


A Shift in Perspective

by kerithwyn



Series: Beyond the Fringe: Tales from the Kinkmeme [5]
Category: Fringe
Genre: F/F, Fringe Kink Meme
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-13
Updated: 2011-11-13
Packaged: 2017-10-26 01:12:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/276909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kerithwyn/pseuds/kerithwyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Olivia kissed a girl and she liked it. Coda to "Bad Dreams," season 1.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Shift in Perspective

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [Fringe kinkmeme](http://fringe-kinkmeme.dreamwidth.org/) using the following prompt:
> 
> Olivia Dunham, femslash-flavoured, not necessarily with another actual person (although really, make my day)
> 
> So the experiences of Bad Dreams: how does Olivia deal with them? The show may to suggest the sex with the beautiful dancer was too overshadowed by her subsequent killing through Nick Lane...but doesn't it make more sense that Olivia, in a quiet moment, remembers -- recalls, even, this having been not just in her head but, as we saw, physical and intense and sticky in the real world?
> 
>  
> 
> This prompt *ate my head* until this came out.

Olivia just can't sleep.

It's been three days since she last saw Nick Lane, lying unconscious in a nameless governmental medical facility. The drug-induced coma he's in has apparently cut off the psychic link he'd been sharing with her for several long, very disturbing days.

The questions haven't stopped as easily.

First and most distressing, of course, is Nick's...connection to her, the way he recognized her when she has no memory of the experience that it's becoming more and more obvious they shared. Olivia lived in Jacksonville as a child. Nina Sharp provided the critical information that there had been a second Cortexiphan drug trial in Jacksonville (and there's clearly an ulterior motive in play, but Nina is entirely too large an enigma to contemplate right now). Nick Lane had been born in Jacksonville, and had manifested a powerful projective empathic ability. And Olivia can no longer deny that she somehow...*interacted* with the device Jones had set on the forty-seventh floor in the building on Church Street.

And she'd tried. She'd tried really damn hard to believe in any other explanation for how the box had turned off. Most likely, she'd rationalized, there was a failsafe. Jones had rigged it to turn off right before the detonation, regardless of how long she stared at it with no effect. Olivia had believed that, despite all the FBI technicians' failure to find such a failsafe, despite Jones' insistent and obviously fanatical faith in her supposed magic powers.

But with all this new evidence arrayed against her, it seems irrefutable that she really had--insane as it is to think, much less say--manifested those magic powers. She and Nick were both experimented on, apparently to turn them into "soldiers" for some impending conflict, and considering that all the rest of Jones' mad prophecy had come to pass....

But even that conundrum isn't what's keeping her up at night.

It's the memory of Nick's...assignation with the dancer called "Ginger" (real name Susan Madison, age 23) that's disturbing Olivia's sleep. Walter would probably say that it's perfectly natural: Olivia was in Nick's head, feeling his emotions and everything physical that went on between them. Even if it was by proxy, that encounter was the most intimate she's been with another person since John died. (Not including the kiss with Lucas in Germany, a product of her loneliness and his familiarity. As disappointed as Lucas had been, in retrospect Olivia had secretly been relieved by Peter's interrupting phone call.) That the incident had been with another woman isn't actually bothering her all that much, especially since it wasn't really *her* in that hotel room.

The strange part is, she can't stop reliving it: the taste of the other woman's mouth under hers, the feel of her skin. Yielding softness where all of Olivia's other experiences recall firm hard flesh, and gentle slopes instead of solid angles. It should be easier than this to distance herself from the memories, especially considering the mechanics; Olivia now knows what it feels like to have a penis and experience intercourse from the male perspective. That understanding, she reflects wryly, could probably make her obscenely rich if the whole case wasn't completely classified and if she had even the slightest desire to reveal it to anyone else.

The information might at least come in handy for her personal life, one day. But until then it's an anomalous postscript to the rest of the encounter, which...didn't feel so very strange at all. Again, that's most likely Nick's emotions and predilections leaking over into her perceptions. Olivia can honestly say she'd never had those kinds of feelings about another woman, so all the attraction and arousal she felt during those moments must have been Nick's.

But it *was* her having an orgasm on the table in the lab, gratification flowing over the psychic link. No more personal, maybe, than those awful experiments with the rats that couldn't stop pressing the button that stimulated their pleasure centers. It's almost a convincing enough theory, except that--like with Jones and the box--evidence keeps piling up against it.

Because now, without any influence from Nick, Olivia catches herself wondering. She *knows* what another woman feels like under her (borrowed) hands. She appreciates what it's like to taste and touch another woman's lips and breasts and the wetness between her thighs. None of that means she ever needs to *do* anything about it, but--

\--but the knowledge is there, and it's not at all unpleasant. What's really keeping Olivia up at night is the sudden understanding that she might be more flexible than she'd ever believed. It's not any kind of crisis, or even causing her the slightest distress. It's just something *new,* something Olivia now needs to integrate into her worldview along with the insanity of Fringe Division and, apparently, super powers. The question of whether or not she wants to explore this new insight is almost irrelevant, considering the demands of her work and lack of time to rediscover a social life. Of any kind.

It's there, though, offering another possible option. And options, Olivia decides, are always good to have in reserve. Just in case.


End file.
